HBO's Harry Potter Just Found Its Second Gilderoy Lockhart

Two actors, one vain professor, and Season 2 hasn’t even started filming yet.

Kit Harington has joined HBO’s Harry Potter series as Gilderoy Lockhart, stepping into the role after Nicholas Hoult — announced for the part just weeks earlier — exited over scheduling conflicts with two other projects. Season 2, adapting Chamber of Secrets, is set to begin filming this fall, ahead of Season 1’s Christmas 2026 premiere.

A recast before the first take

Hoult’s casting as Lockhart made headlines in mid-August. By the end of the month, Deadline was reporting he’d already dropped out — the Season 2 shoot needed to shift around his schedule, and it stopped being workable alongside his existing commitments. Harington was announced as the replacement days later, meaning Lockhart went from unfilled to filled to refilled inside the same month.

It’s the second time this production has had to recast a Season 2 role on short notice, after the scramble to replace Ginny Weasley over the summer. For a season-per-book adaptation with seven books’ worth of casting still ahead, it’s a reminder of how much can shift between an announcement and a first day on set.

Wait, hasn’t Harington played Lockhart before?

Sort of. Harington voiced Gilderoy Lockhart in last year’s Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions, the star-studded audiobook reissue. Stepping into the same character on screen means he arrives already fluent in Lockhart’s particular blend of vanity, charm, and total incompetence — no small thing for a character whose entire arc hinges on getting the tone exactly right.

Lockhart is the show-stealing Defence Against the Dark Arts professor of Chamber of Secrets: a self-promoting fraud with a shelf of ghostwritten memoirs, who was played in the 2002 film by Kenneth Branagh in one of that movie’s most purely fun performances. Whoever plays him carries a lot of the book’s comic relief, which is presumably why HBO moved fast to lock down a replacement rather than let the role sit open.

What it means for the timeline

Season 2 is still on track to begin filming this fall, per HBO. For everyone else confirmed across both seasons — the core trio, the staff table, and every recast along the way — our living HBO series tracker stays current as details land.

While we wait

Casting news always sends a few people down the “which house would I actually be in” rabbit hole — if that’s you, take the Sorting Hat quiz. And if you’re shopping for the Lockhart-obsessed reader in your life (every friend group has one), the full gift guide is sorted by house so you’re not guessing.

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